Re: CONLANG/ZBB crossover (WAS: CONLANG article deleted from Wikipedia)

John Vertical wrote:
>> Philip Newton writes:
>>> ...
>>> (Not to mention that my Usenet client does threading, whereas most
>>> forums I've seen don't -- they just dump entire conversations into one
>>> window, much like Gmail, without making it clear who replied to whom.)
>> And the confusing thing is that in contrast to mails where the correct
>> threading depends on correct mail client implementations (References
>> an In-Reply-To headers) and subject lines etc., which all tend to be
>> partially broken, any forum software has ultimate knowledge about the
>> threading because all replies are under its own control.  Absurd.
>>
>> **Henrik
>
> I may be missing something here, but what the heck are you talking about? I
> haven't seen a single online forum that would jumble all messages together -
> everything *must* be in a thred. Or is it thred-internal organization you're
> after? I'm not sure if that's feasible in forums, but not really on mailing
> lists either, since it's commonplace to reply to more than one person, or
> point, in a single post, and there's 99% of the time a general "reply"
> option in addition to all the "quote" options anyway. Strictly speaking, one
> could just as well quote multiple peeple in a single Usenet message too. And
> if there exists software that can deduce from the actual content of the
> message who and what is it in reply to, I haven't met hir yet :)
Thread internal is what’s being discussed here. Threaded forums do
exist; they’re especially common on places where you have an article
followed by lots of replies more so than forums that are nothing more
than webified mailing lists. Take a look at http://slashdot.org/ for a
well-known (and very old) example.

This style of forum more-or-less eliminates replies to more than one
message in one post, which makes it much easier to follow discussions;
and the only reason multi-reply-single-message is commonplace on flat
forums is because it’s weird to have multiple replies from a single
person directly following each other; and the only reason it’s common-
place here is because we’ve had for so long a five-email-per-person limit.

As for threading with email and usenet, mail/usenet user agents don’t
use the message content to work out what’s a reply to what. Each email
is accompanied by a number of headers: To, CC, From and Date are three
common ones, but in addition to them there’s a number that aren’t shown.
Two in particular are Message-ID which is a unique identifier based on
the domain name of the server you used to send the message, and
In-Reply-To which refers to the message that was selected when you
clicked "reply". All email clients that are at least half-good will add
the In-Reply-To header; your email client isn’t so your emails don’t
show up threaded in mine.

This is why it’s *incredibly, unbelievably* annoying when people who
don’t use a threaded view of their email client press "Reply" to start a
new thread: The new thread appears nested and hidden deep in a tree. The
Reply functionality of email clients should *only* be used to reply to
an email, *never* to start a new thread.

(Altho, Google Mail has a very strange "conversation" feature instead of
threads: It groups together in one flat page all messages with the same
subject in a limited period of time. This has many disadvantages, and
the only advantage is that poorly-trained users don’t learn there’s
something wrong with their use.)
</rant>

--
Tristan.